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I've enjoyed Dixit greatly with groups of 5 and 6, and I'm curious if it needs any rule variations to extend it further. I was thinking perhaps requiring at least 2 players to guess the correct card instead of just 1 when playing with 8 or more people, because otherwise the storyteller can tell a rather unspecific story and still rely on 1 person getting it by guessing.

Does Dixit need any adjustments to play with more than 6 players? If so, which rules would you recommend adding and at what number of players? How would the overall game change when more people were added?

Do not worry about running out of cards to use and having to reshuffle to keep the game going. If you're curious, I actually use Magic: The Gathering cards to play the game, sp we have a deck of around 250 cards, which is more than enough. :D

2 Answers
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Does Dixit need any modifications for more players?
You need some way for each of those players to secretly bid on what card they think is correct (numbered playing cards could work). As for the number of players affecting how likely it is for a random guess to give them points, let's do some math and find out.

Let's assume in all these examples that the storyteller's card is card #1. Player2 plays card 2, Player3 plays card 3, etc.. Let's ignore 3-player alternate rules variant for playing 2 cards. Player's also cannot vote for their own cards (from the rules).

My guess as to the average results for 7, 8, 9, and 10 players is that the Storyteller's average points will approach 2 as the number of players reaches infinity, and the Non-Storyteller's average points will approach 1 as the number of players reaches infinity.

A way to curb the Storyteller from just giving bogus clues, would be to give out bonus points depending upon the number of players. In a 6-player game, approximately 40% (1280/3125) of the time only a single player will get the answer right. If you give out 5 (number of guessers) or 6 (number of players) bonus points to the single guesser that got the answer right, this will add an additional 2.05 or 2.46 point on average to the Non-Storyteller players. This should discourage giving bad clues, since employing a bad clue strategy will on average put you 2 to 2 1/2 points behind. This should scale well, because as the number of players increase, the number of bonus points increases. If you do need to extend this further (not sure you need to, but I haven't worked out the odds of only exactly one person getting it right for 7, 8, ... players), you could give out bonus points rounded down for the total number of players that got it right. (example, 10-Player game: if one person gets it right +10 points, if two people get it right +5 points each, if 3 people get it right +3 points each, ...)

Dixit Odyssey has rules for 7+ players. The suggested scoring system for 7+ players:

Each player has two vote tokens, not just one. They can split their guess between two cards if they want.

If all players correctly identify the storyteller's card, or none do, everyone except the storyteller receives two points each.

Otherwise, the storyteller receives three points and so does anyone else who correctly identifies the storyteller's card. If they only used one of their two votes, they receive a bonus point.

For each other card, the person who played it gets a bonus point (to a maximum of three) for each player who voted for it.

The game ends when the first player reaches 30 points. Calculate the rest of the scoring for the round (in case someone overtakes), and then the winner of the game is the person with the highest number of points.

Re: the 'bogus clues' thing, in my ten-player game yesterday this didn't seem to be an issue; we had at least one or two rounds where no player correctly selected the storyteller's card. Not sure if this was a representative sample though.
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MargaretJan 16 '12 at 2:51

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It appears that this will take care of part of the problem that I identified with the average points for Storytellers approaching 2, and the Non-Storytellers approaching 1 as the number of players approaches infinity. With giving out a +1 point certainty (if that player chooses to), you fix the bogus clue problem (when it is obvious that nothing matches the clue), and you give the players and interesting decision between getting a sure +1 point, or splitting there vote between two possible answers for a better chance at 3 points.
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user1873Jan 16 '12 at 3:10

@user1873 To make it clear, the bonus point is only awarded if their one vote was selecting the correct one (i.e. if you only vote for one, and it happens to be correct, you receive four points instead of three - I don't think the rules made it explicit if you got the bonus when everyone picked correctly, so we played it as "No"). I'm sure that's logical, but your comment made it a bit unclear whether you understood that...
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MargaretJan 16 '12 at 3:20

You were correct, I misunderstood. This scoring system likely fixes the problem with bogus clues anyway. With 2 votes, the non-storytellers are giving out an additional +X points, where X is the number of players. This should result in the non-storytellers average score approaching 2 (like the storyteller), and should handle a bogus clue strategy (or at least make random guessing as effective as bogus clues).
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user1873Jan 16 '12 at 11:40